Snyder & Capullo Reflect on a Half-Decade of Reinventing Batman
“We want to give them our best up until the last page.”
Art by Greg Capullo
Exceptional comics aren’t a rarity in the present day, but rolling them out through a five-arc, 51-issue run is a sight as uncommon as a well-adjusted Bruce Wayne—and somehow, with the 2011 relaunch of DC’s Batman, writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo managed to present both. Through the pair’s run, fans saw Gotham’s terrifying underbelly (“Court of Owls”); modern, horrifying takes on the Joker (“Death of the Family”, “Endgame”); a classed-up take on Batman’s origin (“Zero Year”); and, yes, Jim Gordon taking over the Bat-mantle while an emotionally rehabilitated Bruce Wayne sits on the sidelines (“Superheavy”).
Through the half-decade of issues, Snyder and Capullo built a dedicated core of readers who’ve consecutively buoyed the title near the top of Diamond’s Top 300 charts. And readers, in turn, grew up with the title themselves: In recent months, Snyder and Capullo have received pictures of babies—clutching early issues of Batman—who’ve grown up into walking, talking, comic-literate people. The duo’s heard from kids who tamed the sting of young adulthood with help from their comic.
But with “Superheavy,” the latest hardcover collection of Batman issues with additional contributions from writer Brian Azzarello and artist Jock, fans have been given a signal that the end of this duo’s epic run is nigh. The set collects issues #41-45, which introduce Gotham’s newest heir to the Batman cowl, Jim Gordon, who takes over Bruce Wayne’s duties with the help of a mech suit. There’s a noticeable lightness to the issues within “Superheavy,” partially because Bruce Wayne’s past damages died with the rest of his memories in the “Endgame” battle. But the meat of “Superheavy” is in seeing Gotham through the recently knighted Gordon, who tries to untangle the meaning of Batman through his own ethos.
With “Superheavy” hitting comic shelves this week and the duo’s Batman run ending in a few months with issue #51, we spoke to Snyder and Capullo about Batman’s past, present and future.
Paste: With “Superheavy” setting up the end of your Batman run, what’s it been like processing the end?
Greg Capullo: Wow, that’s a big question. [Laughs]
Scott Snyder: From my end it’s hard because I still haven’t been thinking about it that much. It’s hitting me more now that I don’t have another issue to write for Greg, but we both stay so focused on the task at hand and making sure that it’s good. People will come up to us at cons and ask how it feels to be doing the book for so long, and both of us are more like, “We have to get the next issue done.” There hasn’t been that much time to reflect yet. One of the things I’m proudest of is that we’ve become such good friends and partners creatively, I don’t even see it as something that’s ending. I know we’ll get back together and do stuff in the near future.
Capullo: I agree with Scott. You’re busy working, so you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. But as I’ve drawn some pages, it’s in the back of your head a little bit. But the biggest one that puts it in my face, I interact with fans a lot on Twitter. You get a lot of people going [mimes crying]. There are people crying, screaming “please, no!” You understand that in a lot of people, there’s a lot of really high emotions tied to this thing. I don’t tie it so much to the end, but it really sends home this overwhelming support that the fans have graced us with throughout this run. We gave them 50, and they want 50 more. It’s humbling and it’s rewarding. From my end, we want to give them our best up until the last page.
Snyder: A couple things hit me really hard the other day. One person went online and showed a picture of their kid when they were a baby. They were showing the baby the Joker book, and now the kid is almost six years old [and I’m] seeing the kid holding one of the comics now and being an actual child. There was another boy who wrote to us saying, “I started reading this when I was 10 and now I’m turning 16. It got me through hard times in school.” Those emails and tweets are extremely affecting, and you realize how far we’ve come together. Charting the book has been like charting one of the best friendships I’ve ever made and ever will make, and you see it in the work. I feel like when I read “Zero Year,” I remember what I did wrong, where things went off the rails, where I learned a lesson about how to not overwork a team. I look at “Death of the Family” and see where I learned how to not be so anal about this and that. I see it as the evolution of our friendship. It means a lot that we’ve been able to do it for this long.
Batman: Superheavy Interior Art by Greg Capullo
Paste: For this arc, Jim Gordon’s shift surprised a lot of casual readers. Was there any hesitation to wind down the series with Bruce so far out of the spotlight?
Snyder: I’m always really nervous and anxious about how fans are going to react. I think in some ways, Greg has kept me true to some of the ideas I had on the book and believe in. The first person I call is him. I say, “This is what I’m thinking, and this is why it would give us a story that we wouldn’t be able to get to otherwise. This is how special the elements would be.”
